Spectrum: Studies in Language, Literature, Translation, and Interpretation, Vol. 2, 85-92
Tales of Good-hearted Women: A Comparison of
Gustave Flaubert's “Un Coeur simple”and
Gertrude Stein's “The Good Anna”
善心女人的故事：比較福婁拜的〈一顆單純的心〉和史坦恩的
〈好安娜〉
Shuei-may Chang*
(張學美)
Abstract
This paper compares two short stories of good-hearted spinster women. One is “
Un
Coeur simple”by French writer Gustave Flaubert, and the other is “
The Good Anna”by
American writer Gertrude Stein. “
The Good Anna,”oneoft
het
hr
e
es
t
or
i
e
si
nSt
e
i
n’
s
first book Three Lives,o
we
si
t
sor
i
g
i
npa
r
t
l
yt
oFl
a
ube
r
t
’
s“
Un Coeur Simple,”which is
also one of the three stories in a collection called Trois Contes. Both stories are about a
female servant who sacrifices herself in working for her mistress and helping her friends.
Although the subject is the same, the themes and the ways of presenting the kind women
are very different. Flaubert's story celebrates the sacred soul of Félicité, who is portrayed
as a saint-like figure. Stein's character Anna, on the other hand, suggests the author's
protest against exploitation through Anna's seemingly authoritative but actually
submissive attitude toward the social convention. Moreover, unlike the objective
narrative voice in Flaubert's story, Stein deliberately blends the character's language into
the total voice of the narration. Therefore, despite the literary debt, Stein rewrites the
traditional plot about women's experience by adding the anti-patriarchal element and
using innovative narrative language in the portrait of a sacrificial spinster and hence
gives the story a new meaning.
Key words: Gertrude Stein, Gustave Flaubert, “
The Good Anna,”“
Un Coeur simple,”
Three Lives, Trois Contes, Women’
s Studies.
*
Associate Professor, Department of English, National Changhua University of Education
Shuei-may Chang (張學美)
善心女人的故事：比較福婁拜的「一顆單純的心」和
史坦恩的「好安娜」
Tales of Good-hearted Women: A Comparison of
Gustave Flaubert's “Un Coeur simple”and
Gertrude Stein's “The Good Anna”
張學美*
(Shuei-may Chang)
摘要
這篇論文主要是比較兩個好心老女人的故事，一個是法國作家福婁拜的〈一顆
單純的心〉
，另一個是美國作家史坦恩所寫的〈好安娜〉
。
〈好安娜〉是史坦恩第一本
書《三個生命》中的第一個故事，這個故事的起源之一就是福婁拜的〈一顆單純的
心〉
，而福婁拜的故事也是一本選集《三個故事》中的一個，兩個故事都是有關一名
女僕如何犧牲奉獻、幫助主人及朋友的過程。雖然題材一樣，主旨和表現方式卻大
異其趣，福婁拜的故事把女僕菲莉西蝶描述成一位聖者，有著高潔的靈魂，而史坦
恩筆下的安娜則狀似權威、實則對傳統馴服屈從，用以表達作者對女性被剝削的抗
議。除此之外，福婁拜的故事採取客觀的敘述聲音，而史坦恩則巧妙的把人物的語
言融合在敘述的聲音中，因此，史坦恩的故事來源雖然是福婁拜的小說，卻加上了
反父權的要素，以及創新的敘事語言，改寫了女性犧牲自我的傳統情節，並賦與故
事新的意義。
關鍵詞：史坦恩，福婁拜，
〈好安娜〉
，
〈一顆單純的心〉
，
《三個生命》
，
《三個故事》，
女性研究。
*
國立彰化師範大學英語系副教授
86
Tales of Good-hearted Women: A Comparison of Gustave Flaubert's “Un Coeur simple”and Gertrude
Stein's “The Good Anna”
Gertrude Stein's “
The Good Anna,”one of the three stories in her first book Three
Lives, owes its origin partly to Gustave Flaubert's “
Un Coeur simple,”which is also one
of the three stories in a collection entitled Trois Contes. However, the striking similarities
or the literary debt between “
The Good Anna”and “
Un Coeur simple”do not make these
two books categorized into the same group. The differences in their themes, namely
Stein's investigation of a submissive womanhood and Flaubert's celebration of a sacred
soul, create different impact by similar plots and similar characters. The differences also
lie in the narrative technique. Fl
a
ube
r
t
’
sobj
e
c
t
i
vevi
e
wpoi
nta
ndStein's intimate tone
also help the stories to convey different meanings. St
e
i
n’
sa
va
nt
-garte novella, addressing
the role and perception of women at the turn of the century, is basically a revolt against
the narrative style of realism which is represented byFl
a
ube
r
t
’
sa
r
t
. She sought to
emulate the aesthetic of the innovative painters like Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse. The
focus on language, tone, and description in the collection catapulted her to the forefront
of the influential American Modernist Movement, which inspired later novelists such as
Ernest Hemingway and others. Thus as a female writer, Stein rewrites the traditional plot
about the kind-hearted spinster and expresses a sense of immediacy and privacy in telling
a woman's story.
Both “
Un Coeur simple”and “
The Good Anna”are about the life story of a spinster
and servant woman who is uneducated, compassionate, morally good, and faithful to her
mistress all her lifetime. When Flaubert wrote the story, he meant to move the reader by
his innocent protagonist Félicité. The story is quite simple. Félicité is a country maid who
spends her entire life in humble and dedicated domestic service. She loves successively a
man who abandons her, the children of her mistress (one dies and the other becomes a
good-for-nothing), a nephew who dies in a distant land, and an old man in the last stage
of his illness, until she finally discovers superior happiness with a parrot which she has
stuffed after he dies too. This stuffed bird, the sole consolation in her own lonely death,
becomes for her a mystic fetish. Thus the story is a pathetic one about a “
servante au
grand coeur”(a servant with a noble heart), a woman poor in spirit but immensely rich in
her capacity to serve and to love.
The story begins with a statement that “
Pendant un demi-siècle, les bourgeoises de
Pont-l
’
Evêque envièrent à Mme Aubain sa servante Félicité”(Flaubert 43) (During the
half century, the bourgeoisie of Pont-l
’
Evê
quee
nvi
e
dMa
da
meAuba
i
nf
orhe
rs
e
r
va
nt
Fe
l
i
c
i
t
e
)

. As a matter of fact, Félicité is exploited by everyone around her. For one
hundred francs a year, she does all the cooking, the washing, the ironing and the sewing,
not to mention various duties in the stable and the barnyard. She is taken advantage of by
a ruthless sister and her greedy family. Every time her nephew Victor comes to visit her,
he is told to bring his clothes to be mended and bring something back such as a packet of
brown sugar, some soap, a little brandy, or even money. However, Félicité always does
87
Shuei-may Chang (張學美)
her work gladly. The exploitation and her victimized status never bother her. Her
ignorance and saint-like naivete
prove to be incorruptible.
Moreover, Félicité's life is filled with short-lived relationships. She grows up as an
orphan working in the fields. She has her love story, but her lover Theodore betrays her
and abandons her by marrying a rich old woman. She is upset for a while and decides to
leave the farm where she works. Then she begins to work in Mme Aubain's house. She
loves Mme Aubain's children Paul and Virginie and forgets her grief of the lost love.
However, Paul is soon sent to school in Caen and Virginie is sent as a boarder to the
Ursuline Convent at Honfleur. Later Virginie dies from illness before moving back home.
In her loneliness, Fe
licite
asks permission to receive her nephew Victor's visits. Again
this regular visit from Victor does not last long. Victor leaves by boat for Havana for a
long-term employment. Fe
licite
makes it her business to see the boat off, only to get lost
on the way and miss it as it separates from the quai. She even yells Victor's name to some
young sailors on the boat she does not even recognize. She never really sees him leave
and never hears from him in Havana. She can only imagine his status by the connection
of cigar with the place Havana. The only news she gets about him is his death. After all
these miseries and loss, she finally gets her only consolation in life: the parrot Loulou.
Though Loulou also dies shortly, it becomes for her the image of Holy spirit, and she is
never bothered by any loss any more including the death of her mistress Mme Aubain and
the deprivation of the household.
Thus it is ironical that her name is Félicité, since her life is a succession of
bereavements. She lives a meaningless existence in a disconsolate world of which she
herself is unable to make any critical assessment (Brombert 245). However, the name is
proper too in the sense that she never feels suffered and deprived, and she never feels the
need to complain. Her nature of simplicity makes her incapable of suffering and hatred.
So she is really fortunate because she is always happy and satisfied by transcending her
suffering through endless and unconditional love.
Since she does not have a family of her own, she is devoted to the family of her
mistress. She even risks her life to save Mme Aubain against the attack of the bull, and
she never prides herself in the least on what she has done. When Virginie dies, it is
Felicite
alone who keeps the vigil for two nights. She kisses the dead body several times,
wraps her in a shroud, puts her in the coffin, and finally cuts off a big lock of the girl's
hair, half of which she slips into her bosom resolving never to part with it (Flaubert 64).
She takes care of not only the children but also Mme Aubain as a mother. However, when
Victor is unheard and finally dead, no one cares about Félicité's feelings. In her grief, she
still has her duties of washing and needlework to do. Her capacity of love even extends to
the unknown sick old man and the parrot Loulou. The eternal sense of maternity and
mercy turns her simple heart into a sacred soul.
88
Tales of Good-hearted Women: A Comparison of Gustave Flaubert's “Un Coeur simple”and Gertrude
Stein's “The Good Anna”
The story is told in a predominant mood of softness and sadness. Flaubert avoided
his free indirect discourse used in his previous novels like Madame Bovary which enables
the reader to slip easily from the narrated text to the mind of his character. Instead, he
employed a narrator who leads the reader to see things through Félicité's naive eyes
without entering her psyche. As Leonard Marsh points out: “
Flaubert wanted to underline
the absence of normal conceptive powers in this character who was to be by her very
nature so simple, the very antithesis of Emma, willing to accept life's routine,
uncomplicated and uncontriving”(Marsh 185). She is afflicted with defective vision and
sense of hearing, but she does not suffer from it because she is not aware of it. Contrast to
this limited power of conception and limited sense of perception, her mysterious final
vision of the spirit of the Holy Ghost, which is identified with the stuffed parrot Loulou,
becomes miraculous, and hence her story becomes a tale of hagiography. Her touching,
blissful innocence, and scared self-abnegation create the thematic irony that goodness
should be embodied in total ignorance or simplicity.
Gertrude Stein's “
The Good Anna”also starts from an ironical statement: “
The
tradesmen of Bridgepoint learned to dread the sound of 'Miss Mathilda,' for with that
name the good Anna always conquered”(Stein 11). Anna is a German immigrant servant
who accepts her conventional social role and its destiny and remains faithful to her
mistress as Fe
licitedoes. Although she is described as a dominant figure who has
authority over the affairs of the household, she never “
conquers”her role as a servant
woman. She seems to have a bad temper as she always scolds her under servants and
even her mistress Miss Mathilda. But she always means well because what she is
concerned with most is decency. She has high ideals for chastity and discipline. Her goal
of life seems to be “
good”as her title indicates. Therefore, in spite of her devotion to the
family of her mistress or her enjoyment of the relationship with her friends, Anna is very
aware of her position as a servant woman. She quits the job when she feels that she is
treated like a maid instead of a servant by her old mistress. She has her dignity of a
servant, but she never has any idea beyond that. Thus she is confined by what “
good”
means according to social convention, and she persists to be a devoted servant all her
lifetime.
Like Félicité, Anna works hard and tries to save money for the household, and she
hardly spends any money on herself. She is exhausted till death for managing the family
of her mistress. It is the duty and devotion of her whole life. Moreover, she scolds and
defends her mistress Miss Mathilda and cherishes her as a mother. She even treats the
strayed dogs in the same way as a mother does. Although Anna is not so tamed and
amiable like Fe
licite
, her way of treating those who have troubles with her like the under
servant Molly is still charitable. Molly has a bad temper and does the job poorly. Anna
and Molly do not get along with each other. However, Anna keeps her for a long time out
of kindness and even takes care of her after she quits the job. When Miss Mathilda is
89
Shuei-may Chang (張學美)
abroad, Anna is reluctant to leave, so she changes the place into a boarding house.
Nevertheless, she still works as a housekeeper to serve the boarders till she is exhausted
to death. Actually, Anna is hardly ill-treated by anyone in the conventional sense and she
has not made any mistake on her part either. As what Stein quotes Jules Laforgue in front
of the book: “
Donc je suis un malheureux et ce n'est ni ma faute ni celle de la vie,”(So I
am a miserable person, and it is not my fault nor the fault of life.) Anna's tragedy is
determined by her loyalty to the conventional code of female self-sacrifice and
faithfulness to her social role as a servant.
Despite Anna's active power to love and to dominate, she is still submissive to her
position as a working class woman and victimized by it. Both Félicité and Anna dumbly
accept the fortunes of life without knowing being trapped in them. However, besides
Flaubert's feeling of compassion and tenderness toward the servant woman, Stein sets the
mood of resignation and tells the story with poignancy and sense of fatalism. Hence,
Stein's intention is to investigate a submissive womanhood by presenting the typological
description of the character instead of celebrating the character's beautiful soul. The
different intentions make Flaubert's character a blessed figure in spite of her sufferings
and Stein's character a pitiful figure in spite of her seemingly authorized position.
Besides the different themes mentioned above, the major difference between the two
female servant stories is the technique in narration. Both stories are told by means of
accretion of episodes. In these episodes, like Flaubert, Stein uses a lot of ironies. One way
she creates ironies is by the sophistication of her narrative consciousness which is
blended into the total voice of the book. According to Michael Hoffman, the narrator not
only reflects the dialect of the characters but also expresses the inarticulate thoughts of
the characters in the very language that they would use, were they able to express their
thoughts for themselves (Hoffman 31). However, the intrusive narrator in Stein's story
and the discrepancy between the tone and situation causes a sense of ironic detachment.
The whole story is told in a light and jolly tone even when the narrator occasionally
repeats sentences like: “
You see that Anna led an arduous and troubled life”(Stein II, 13,
etc.). The “
wise-child” tone of the narrative voice ironically betrays the hidden
compassion of the author through the seemingly objective narrator.
Another important technique is repetition. Stein takes great pleasure in words to the
extent that she keeps repeating them with various inflect to convey a certain aura about
the character portrayed. The use of repeated sentences and phrases helps to establish
Anna as a primitively simple person who is fixed in a certain mode of life and who thinks
and does everything within the context of inexorable circumstances. As Beverly Hume
points out, the use of repetition creates the sense of prolonged and continuous present and
demonstrates the banality and mediocrity of the characters' existence. Women are trapped
in the “
presents”and destructively polarized relationships throughout their lives (Item 13).
They are confined in the routines of their existence without the prospect of a future and
90
Tales of Good-hearted Women: A Comparison of Gustave Flaubert's “Un Coeur simple”and Gertrude
Stein's “The Good Anna”
the development of their potential.
Actually, Stein's narrative technique is inspired by Cézanne's painting “
Portrait of
Mme. Ce
zanne”which is installed in the studio room of Stein's apartment when she and
her brother Leo expatriates in Paris. “
The Good Anna”owes a debt to Cézanne's painting
as much as to Flaubert's “
Un Coeur simple”
: the latter initiates the plot of the story but
the former inspires the form. From the painting, Stein develops a similar technique of
incantatory repetition. In other words, Stein acquires Cézanne's techniques in painting a
woman and applies them to her own writing in the portrait of her female protagonists.
She evolves an original literary portraiture that subordinates the plot to the
characterization in order to pose the character in the center and establish the relations and
situations to generate the story. The portrait is hence like a cinematic continuous
succession of the statement of what the person is. She likes to use simple, direct, and
even monosyllabic words to portray the characters. According to Jonathan Levin, the way
she wields language is like the way the modern painters she admired are presenting form
through a simplified use of color and line (Introduction). The way she views her
characters is like the way a painter looks at the models at the moment. Fiction as a
time-based art is approached with verbal equivalence to a painting which presents the
character in a certain situation at the moment. Therefore, the social convention about this
character is dismantled and she is able to deconstruct the patriarchal norms of ''goodness''
and subvert the social type of a loyal servant and kind woman. The employment of the
aesthetic experiments makes Stein's story a modernist work and hence establishes a new
mode of narration challenging the conventions of imitation and the production of
illusions of reality represented by the tradition of Flaubert's realism.
Both Flaubert's “
Un Coeur simple”and Stein's “
The Good Anna”are stories of
faithful servant women. Both Félicité and Anna have simple personality. They are
charitable, devoted, thrifty, and hard-working. Although Anna has a hot temper and
always scolds, she has a same good heart and sense of maternity as Fe
licite
does. Both
characters are not aware of their determined miserable fate and unconsciously accept
their social role as an inferior servant. However, Flaubert's intention to celebrate a
beautiful and sacred soul is different from Stein's purpose through different
characterization and ways of narration. Stein tells the story not only with compassion but
also with poignancy and a sense of feminine resistance. As a result, the two authors
present different styles with the employment of different narrative techniques. Stein's
unique and innovative structure and language rewrites the traditional plot involving
women. The innovation is the “
anti-patriarchal”element which reflects the change of
conventionally accepted patterns of woman's experience. Thus in terms of both content
and form, Stein recreates a tale of spinster in the modernist manner.
91
Shuei-may Chang (張學美)
Works Cited
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Parrots, Pictures, Rays, Perfumes: Epiphanies in George Sand and
Flaubert.” Studies in Short Fiction 22.2 (1985): 209-17.
Brombert, Victor. The Novels of Flaubert: A Study of Themes and Techniques. Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1966.
Dunn, Margaret M. “
Altered Patterns and New Endings: Reflections of Change in Stein's
Three Lives and H. D.'s Palimpsest.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 9.2
(1987): 54-59.
Flaubert, Gustave. Trois Contes. Paris: Flammation, 1986.
Haig, Stirling. “
The Substance of Illusion in Flaubert's ‘
Un Coeur simple.’
” Standford
French Review 7.3 (1983): 301-15.
Hoffman, Michael F. Gertrude Stein. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976.
Hume, Beverly. “
Prolonged Banality: Time and Stein's Three Lives.” Notes on Modern
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Levin, Jonathan. Three Lives. By Gertrude Stein. Introduction. New York: Barnes &
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Marsh, Leonard. “
Visual Perception in Flaubert's ‘
Un Coeur simple.’
” Studies in Short
Fiction 23.2 (1998): 185-89.
Stein, Gertrude. Three Lives. New York: Vintage Books, 1909
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